Assessing The Virus

First off let me say that I think the C19 virus was, in fact, a modified virus developed in the Chinese lab at Wuhan. That said, I also think it got out by accident, Chinese quality control being legendary.

Having gotten out, the Chinese government turned out to be a fan of the “Never let a crisis go to waste” school of thought. Initial reaction was to try to suppress news of the outbreak in hopes of not getting caught working on biological warfare, but when that failed, the well oiled disinformation machine went into top gear. “Studies” from China told us that the virus was not human-to-human transmissible, That masks did no good, that HCQ not only didn't help, it increased your chances of dying, and that first Remdesivir didn't work, and second that the Chinese had gone into full production of the stuff and were ready to sell it at a good price. We were also told that they had testing kits ready in large quantities suspiciously quickly, and they sold them all over the world to gullible governments.

What the Chinese learned, quickly enough, was that the virus was more dangerous to the elderly than to anyone else. In China that group, “the elderly” has two meanings: First is the old and retired population, or as Stalin called them, “the unproductive units”. No great loss there. The other meaning is “the most senior levels of government”. This hits close to home as it's the most important demographic in China. Just ask them.

In the meantime, shutdowns impact the economies of the capitalist world in ways the Chinese military could only dream about. In parallel with this, is work on vaccines which are currently being tested on Uigurs in Xinkiang. Given that C19 is the same type of virus as the common cold, I expect to see a vaccine against the common cold show up about the same time as the C19 vaccine, which is to say, never. Also remember that Chinese vaccines can be expected to work about as well as anything else you'd get at Harbor Freight.

Meantime there's efforts to “flatten the curve” and to impart “Herd immunity”. What this means in the first case is that not so many cases requiring hospitalization develop at once to overwhelm the hospitals. In the long run, the same number of people die, they just die a few months later. In the second case, once all those susceptible people shuffle off the mortal coil, the virus will kill fewer people over all. Note that it will never actually go away, it will simply sputter along on a reduced number of victims. Thus C19 will join the ranks of leading causes of geriatric death along with H1N1 and heart failure, as just another unfortunate statistic. We are seeing this now in the increasing number of cases being discovered as the economy opens up, and a steadily falling death rate as the most vulnerable are removed from the population. The way it works, any government can expect to see the same infection and mortality curves, and since mortality is going down and infections can be expected to begin to decline similarly over time, all politicians can crow about the success of their plans and get re-elected.